The Bertie Project

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Nicola looked at the young man partly obscured by the figures of his wife and of Mary of Guise. “Yes,” she said. “That’s Darnley.”

  “He was blown up, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes he was, Bertie. At Kirk o’Fields, where the university is today. He was, I’m afraid to say, blown right up in the air.”

  Bertie gazed up at Darnley. “Ranald says that he deserved it. Ranald says that Darnley stabbed Rizzio with a Swiss Army penknife right there in Holyroodhouse.”

  Nicola smiled. “I don’t think they had Swiss Army penknives in those days, Bertie. They used hunting knives, I imagine.”

  “Was James unhappy just because his mummy got her head chopped off by Queen Elisabeth?” asked Bertie. “Was that why?”

  Nicola’s gaze moved to a figure close by—the humanist, Buchanan, the young James’s severe tutor—such joy as there was in that young life would have been nipped in the bud by that grim killjoy.

  “There were other reasons, Bertie. He had a very strict teacher.”

  “Did he hit him? Did he hit James?”

  Nicola shook her head. “Probably not. But I’m sure he frightened him. And then…” And then what? When did the frustration of love denied first begin to distort the soul? And how could she explain that to Bertie? She could not.

  But she did not have to. Bertie had moved on and was gazing up at the figures of Mar and Argyll. “That’s the Earl of Mar, isn’t it, Granny? He was very brave, wasn’t he?”

  “He was, Bertie.”

  Bertie pointed to Argyll. “And the Duke of Argyll,” he said. “He was a Campbell, wasn’t he?”

  Nicola confirmed this.

  “You’d think he’d look more ashamed of himself,” said Bertie. “You’d think that he’d look more ashamed of being a Campbell.”

  Outside the Playhouse Theatre

  Immersed in Scottish history, Nicola came up for air only just in time to realise that if she and Bertie were to meet Stuart as promised they would have to leave the Scottish National Portrait Gallery without delay. Prising Bertie away from a portrait of Professor Higgs contemplating an opaque set of scribbled figures, Nicola led the way out into York Place.

  “Daddy will be meeting us at Valvona & Crolla very soon,” she said. “So we mustn’t linger, Bertie.”

  Walking beside her, his hand in hers, Bertie looked down at the pavement. There had been a time when he would have taken care to avoid stepping on the cracks—an elementary precaution observed by any sensible child keen to avoid bears or other, unnamed dangers. Now, however, he realised that he simply did not care, no matter what dire warnings Olive had once given in the playground that his general conduct would have terrible consequences.

  “You may think you’re above it all, Bertie,” she had threatened, wagging her finger at him. “But I’ve got news for you. God’s going to get you one day, Bertie Pollock, and when he does, boy, are you going to regret what you’ve done. He keeps a note, you know; he writes it all down.”

  “That’s right,” said Olive’s lieutenant, Pansy. “It’s all written down, Bertie. You’ve had it, you know.”

  “And what about you?” challenged Bertie. “Do you think God hasn’t noticed what you do? All those fibs you tell?”

  Pansy had hesitated, and Bertie had thought that his question had struck home. But then Olive had retrieved the situation for the girls.

  “This is all about boys,” she announced. “They’re the ones who have to worry.”

  “That’s right,” said Pansy, relieved at the immunity. “This is not about girls.”

  “Yes,” said Olive. “Boys have had it, Bertie. They’re finished. There’s no point in being a boy any more. Everybody knows that.”

  “Exactly,” said Pansy. “Everybody—except some boys, of course.”

  That brought peals of laughter from Olive, and the two girls had sauntered off, secure in their understanding that girls had inherited the world and that boys were, for the most part, a spent force.

  Now, walking purposefully with Nicola down the urban brae, Bertie transferred his gaze from the ground to his grandmother. He had a question to ask, and he was struggling to find the right words to ask it.

  “Do you think that…” he began, but then trailed off. The noise of a passing bus drowned his voice.

  “What’s that, Bertie?” asked Nicola. “Do I think what?”

  She had, in fact, been thinking at the time of what she would buy at the delicatessen and was contemplating the purchase of a large Milanese salami and a wedge of ripe Parmesan. She had a friend coming in to see her that evening and they would sit in the kitchen with the salami, the cheese and a glass of Puglian wine, and imagine they were in Italy. Bliss! She had read, as everybody had, that salami was suddenly on the list of things you should not enjoy because they were bad for you, but where did it end? Was Parmesan cheese also to be avoided? And Puglian wine? Surely not. The Italians lived to a ripe old age, particularly in the south, where everybody knew they sat about munching away and drinking their wine and generally enjoying themselves—for eighty or ninety years in most cases until they eventually breathed their last and were taken skywards by hosts of angels and putti. Those baroque Neapolitan artists captured all that so vividly in those overwrought paintings of theirs, and presumably the image sustained people, made them more content, and increased their hedonistic Mediterranean lifespan. Whereas in Scotland, we shivered and battled with our consciences, iconoclasts all, and looked askance at people who were enjoying themselves too much. We’ll pay for it might be a Scottish motto; far more fitting than Nemo me impune lacessit…wha daur meddle wi’ me?

  That was what Nicola had been thinking when Bertie began to find the words to express himself.

  “It’s just that I was wondering,” continued Bertie. “I was wondering whether…not that I’m actually saying we should do this, but I was just wondering: do you think that…”

  She squeezed his hand. “Come on, Bertie, out with it. You can say anything to me, you know that.”

  Bertie took a deep breath. He was a loyal child, and the expression of a sentiment as disloyal as the one he was about to reveal troubled him. “I was wondering whether I could come and live with you?”

  There, he had said it. And the words, simple in themselves, and quietly uttered, nonetheless seemed to reverberate across the sky.

  Nicola stopped. She looked down at her grandson. “Live with me, Bertie? In my flat?”

  Bertie nodded. He did not dare meet Nicola’s eye but stared firmly at the pavement. And he was standing on a crack, directly across it, in such a way that no supernatural force, no matter how temporarily unobservant, could fail to notice.

  “Yes,” he said. His voice now sounded small and faltering.

  Nicola squeezed his hand again. “You mean that you’d like to move out of Scotland Street altogether?”

  He nodded.

  Nicola was gentle. “But you’re happy enough, aren’t you? You’re happy living with Daddy and Ulysses and…” She had to summon up all her reserves to complete the sentence. “…And Mummy?”

  Bertie shook his head. “No, I’m not, Granny. I’m not happy. I want to come and stay in your house and do these things with you. Go to the Portrait Gallery. Eat pizzas. Watch films.”

  Nicola swallowed hard. “Oh, Bertie, my darling wee boy.” She bent down and put her arms around him. What could she possibly say to this request—a request that came from a small and sorrowful heart?

  Another bus went slowly past and then stopped, waiting for traffic to clear. It was only a few feet from them, and as Nicola looked out from her embrace, out beyond Bertie’s shoulder on which her hand rested, she found herself staring straight into the eyes of one of the passengers on the bus, a woman of about her own age. The woman was looking back at her, and seemed to know, in an instant, what she was witnessing. Only a pane of glass lay between them, and that is too little to suppress fellow feeling—as when we see a person who weeps on one side of a
barrier while we are on another. Human barriers are permeable to tears—and always have been.

  At Valvona & Crolla

  Bertie, though, was filled with regret. Having asked Nicola whether he could come to live with her, from her reaction he realised immediately that this was an impossible request. The roof you were allocated in life was the roof under which you had to continue to stay—at least until you were eighteen, when you could go and live in Glasgow if you were lucky. So, rather than persisting with an impossible demand, as most children of his age would do, Bertie backtracked.

  “I don’t really want to leave Scotland Street,” he said, trying as hard as he could to sound cheerful. “I was just wondering, Granny—that’s all.”

  Nicola said nothing, but hugged him more closely to her. What could she say? There was no freedom wand to wave—there never was.

  “Well, be that as it may, Bertie,” she said at last, releasing him from her embrace, “we need to get down to Valvona & Crolla and see whether we can find some…” she paused, watching his expression, and then added, “…some panforte di Siena. Would you like that?”

  There was only one answer to that. There might be those who, for some inexplicable reason, do not like panforte di Siena; it is possible, too, that there are misguided souls who cannot abide truffles lightly sprinkled over scrambled eggs, or marzipan, or an Aberdeen buttery, or haggis—such people exist, of course—but Bertie was not one of them, at least when it came to panforte di Siena. So with a renewed spring in his step he accompanied Nicola the last few hundred yards to the inviting doors of Valvona & Crolla, registered providers of cheese to Holyroodhouse and others. And purveyors, too, of almost every sort of delicacy, hard, soft, or liquid, that the Italian peninsula gives to the world.

  Mary Contini met them at the door. “So, Bertie,” she said, “how’s the Italian going?”

  Bertie had regular Italian conversazione sessions with Irene, and was reasonably fluent in the language—rather better, in fact, than Irene herself, who made regular grammatical errors. The reason for that, of course, was that Irene rarely bothered to check whether what she said was correct, so convinced was she of her vision of the world: if the Italians used a slightly different construction from that which she chose to use, then that said more about the Italians than it did about her.

  Bertie replied politely. “Va bene, grazie.” He did not enjoy his Italian conversazione sessions, but he was too polite to say this. Nor did he enjoy, for that matter, his yoga classes and his psychotherapy, but he had long since come to understand that these were features of the firmament under which he lived, and there was no point in arguing against your personal planets: these were as fixed in the heavens as Edinburgh Castle was on earth. And what made this hard to bear was the knowledge that whenever he proposed that one of his activities be dropped, then he would simply be told that he should be happy to be having something that many children would love to have, if only they had the means. Bertie simply did not believe this; he could not imagine that any child, anywhere, would willingly submit to psychotherapy, talk Italian—unless of course they were Italian—or submit to the ministrations of the teacher at Yoga for Tots who was constantly seeking to bend Bertie and other members of the yoga class into positions that human anatomy was simply not intended to assume.

  Mary knew of Nicola’s tastes, and so they were quickly led off to sample a consignment of salame calabrese that had arrived the previous day.

  “This has wild Italian fennel seeds in it,” explained Mary, as she cut off a slice and handed it to Nicola. “Highly recommended.”

  Bertie tried a piece too; it was a bit too spicy for him, but he was pleased that Nicola appeared to like it. His eyes, of course, had wandered and he had spotted the section on the shelves reserved for sweet products: for amaretti di Saronna, anicini and canucci. Mary Contini, noticing the direction of his gaze, led him by the hand to choose a suitable small box of panforte. That done, she suggested that the three of them go into the cafeteria in the back, where Bertie could sample his newly-acquired panforte.

  Stuart arrived twenty minutes later, after Mary had left them in the café. Bertie rushed up to greet him, hugging his father’s legs in a gesture that was as possessive as it was proud. Nicola watched, and swallowed.

  “We had an interesting visit to the Portrait Gallery,” she remarked to Stuart. “Bertie’s compiling a list of portraits in that red book of his.”

  “I saw a picture of Professor Higgs,” said Bertie. “He’s looking at some sums on a board, and smiling.”

  “That’s how they always portray physicists,” said Stuart. “Look at those famous pictures of Einstein with all those symbols in chalk on the board behind him.”

  “No sign of Professor Higgs’s boson, though,” said Nicola, “although it must have been there in the picture.”

  “It’s everywhere,” said Bertie. “Even in your nose.”

  “Oh well,” said Nicola, “we shall get by somehow.”

  Stuart nodded; it seemed to Nicola that he was slightly distracted. Perhaps he was busy; sometimes his duties as a statistician in the Scottish Government weighed heavily on him, and this might be such a time. Of course there was the additional strain, she told herself, of Irene’s return and the readjustment to normal family life after an unusual interlude.

  “So, everything all right, Stuart?” asked Nicola.

  Stuart nodded. He looked away.

  “I saw Daddy in the museum,” said Bertie brightly.

  Nicola raised an eyebrow. “In Chambers Street? In the museum in Chambers Street?”

  Bertie continued. “Yes. He was meeting a lady there.”

  Stuart glanced discouragingly at Bertie. Nicola noticed.

  “Business,” he said hurriedly. “One of my colleagues.”

  At that moment, Nicola knew that he was lying. Mothers know—they just know. Sons may try to lie to their mothers—some sons may lie to their mothers over years and years, but mothers always know. And at that moment, Nicola knew not only that Stuart was lying, but that he was having an affair.

  She was delighted; the warmth arising within her was, she thought, not unlike that feeling one experiences when spring arrives and things begin to live again.

  Silting Up

  After twenty minutes of conversation, Stuart looked at his watch and declared that it was time to leave. Nicola glanced at Bertie, who briefly met her eyes, and then looked away. Under the table, she reached for his hand and held it briefly, knowing that there were things she could not say and he could not hear. Whatever Irene’s faults—and where would one begin to enumerate them?—she was Bertie’s mother, and he should stay with her. And yet, when Stuart had unwittingly revealed that he was having an affair, she felt not the normal regret that a mother would have on learning that all was not well with her son’s marriage, but unalloyed joy at the thought that at long last Stuart was making a break for freedom. The initial euphoria that accompanied this realisation, of course, would soon be tempered by concern about what this would mean for Bertie and Ulysses, but there would be time enough for that later on; for the moment, all that mattered was that Stuart was showing some signs of resistance to tyranny—and tyranny, Nicola thought, was not too strong a word for Irene’s regime.

  “So,” said Nicola, as she rose from the table in the Valvona & Crolla cafeteria, “what lies ahead this afternoon?”

  Stuart was helping Bertie with his coat. “Bertie is going to…”

  “Yoga,” said Bertie, with a sigh. “Mummy’s taking me to yoga in Stockbridge.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” said Nicola, summoning all her resources. “And is Ulysses going too?”

  Bertie nodded. “He’s hopeless at yoga because he doesn’t know how to walk yet. So he lies on the ground and Mummy lifts his arms and legs up and down.”

  Nicola exchanged a glance with Stuart. He looked away quickly, and she thought: he knows, he knows! Of course he knows how ridiculous that woman is.

 
; “And what about you, Stuart?” she asked.

  He took a few moments to reply, and she noticed the hesitation. “I was thinking of going for a walk,” he said. “Later this afternoon.”

  “How wise,” said Nicola. “We should all be walking more. Did you read about the latest advice on this? We should get up from our desks, they say, and walk around the room every fifteen minutes.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough.”

  “Because there is nothing worse than sitting at a desk all day without moving,” Nicola continued. “Apparently you silt up that way.”

  Stuart nodded vaguely; he was thinking of people in the office who had silted up. There were quite a few, he decided, and for a moment he imagined their obituaries, Died of silt…It would be a fate redolent of being swallowed by quicksand—not a common fate, he imagined, but one that presumably did overtake people from time to time. As a statistician he was well aware of the surprising ways in which people left this life, and just how many succumbed to the rarer strokes of fate. There were forty-six thousand people killed by snakebite in India each year—the real figure, Stuart had read, in spite of official claims that it was only two thousand; and as for shark attacks, he had seen a report that the risk of being eaten by a shark was one in 913,200,766. That was not a significant risk, but it did not take into account that many people never swam in the sea at all, whereas some took their surfboards into the very waves where great whites liked to lurk. Their risk, surely, was considerably greater.

  Nicola ended his reverie. “Are you going to walk in the Pentlands, perhaps? It’s a nice afternoon for it. Remember how we used to go there?”

  He did—and she did too, remembering Stuart as a boy, in those grey trousers of his, the serge ones built to withstand the ravages of active boyhood, clambering down towards the Logan Burn with the wind off Scald Law behind them. The memory brought a pang, as such memories often do; the world was more innocent then, or at least Scotland was.